The wonderful thing about watching Top Chef during this pandemic is that it offers perfect escapism. It’s about people living together in a house, about sharing and preparing communal meals, about going to restaurants, and about competing to work in one of our last honest businesses: the restaurant industry. Not to mention, it offers the kind of intense familiarity that only a show that’s been on for almost 15 years can bring. Remember how things used to be? Isn’t it great how things never change?

Talking to Top Chef host Tom Colicchio is… well, not like that at all.

It’s more like getting repeatedly slapped in the face by reality. I’ve always appreciated Colicchio’s refusal to play along with the usual unscripted TV drama (you could make an hour-long supercut of his eye rolls alone) but now that I want to have a nice light interview about yummy food and my pretend friends from the TV, all he wants to do is assault me with facts and enlist me in the fight to get someone, anyone, to care.

I should’ve known better. Colicchio is a restauranteur, and restaurants, notoriously a precarious business even in boom times, are… let’s say “facing an unknown future.” He has a massive staff he has to think about, and, if that weren’t enough, there are his non-profit ventures dealing with hunger and nutrition. All those events they put on in order to raise money? Gone. And all the people that money goes to help? Multiplying exponentially by the day.

It’s hard not to feel demoralized. But Colicchio is fired up. He has facts, organizations, action plans. He speaks in complete paragraphs. How could I ask about TV and sauce recipes when he was on such a roll? Luckily, I didn’t want to. What he had to say as a restaurant owner, a businessman, and someone who has seen the food supply chain and its infrastructure first hand was more interesting than what he had to say as a TV star or a chef anyway.

Colicchio’s main point: this wasn’t about some specific charity he was promoting (as these interviews are often pitched) or his specific role as an individual. It was about how the quarantine is exposing problems people like him have been working to change for years — an overly centralized, overly integrated food processing system, razor-thin profit margins for restaurant owners, low wages for essential workers, a healthcare system tied to employment, and government leaning on non-profits to do work government should be doing. As you’ll see, the man knows his stuff and we dive right into it.

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So what are leaders in the food community doing to help stop kids from going hungry?

I wouldn’t characterize it as what I’m doing because there’s not a whole lot you can do as an individual right now. Right now New York City, the schools, the school cafeteria workers are feeding kids. [Here’s a bit on FoodCorp’s efforts] Essentially, they’re feeding anyone who shows up for a meal. That’s still happening. They’re not going to the schools to actually eat the meals, but they’re there to pick up food and they can take it home with them. That’s kind of the extent of it. I think more than anything quite frankly, COVID’s exposing just how fragile the system that we have for feeding people is.

Right.

So the bigger question I think is, why do 30 million kids or — I think it’s 22 million kids — the only meal they’re getting in some cases are breakfast and lunch in school? And when we have a crisis of this size it really exposes just how poor the system that we have set up. And typically our government is very happy to let charity step in and fill a void. What you’re seeing now is that charities are completely overrun and soup kitchens that can’t keep up. The need is too great. Volunteers just aren’t stepping up because everybody should be staying inside.

So what have you been working on during this crisis?

The programs that we were working on, we’re struggling to figure out we can continue them. And we’re a small organization so I imagine every organization is going through this unless you were sitting on a pile of cash. Another non-profit that I work with, Children of Bellevue, they act as advocates for short-term/long term care in Bellevue Hospital. They create programs for the hospital as well. Our big fundraiser was going to be in April. That event last year we raised $700,000. This year we’re not having it. This crisis exposes the idea of government pushing everything to the private sector just doesn’t work.

What are some of the things that you’ve been advocating for?

Universal free lunch at school where it’s not the three-tier model we have now where it’s free, reduced, or full-fare. Where it’s actually free. That the nutrition is much better in school lunches. We, with the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act that was signed over the Obama Administration, we actually made school lunch a lot healthier, and this administration is looking to push back on some of those gains. Fighting for that. Making sure that SNAP is much more robust and that doesn’t have so many restrictions. There’s a role for the organizations that are feeding people on the ground, but again, it shouldn’t be funded through charities, it should be funded through government. A lot of the things that we’re talking about are because of poverty and I think right now COVID is kind of exposing the weakness of our entire safety net.

It seems like with the administration now, anytime you promote a program that addresses poverty or unemployment there’s this idea that you’re going to somehow incentivize poverty. Do you have a response to that?

No. Nobody wants to be poor because they need an incentive. This idea that we should pull ourselves up by the bootstraps… People are born with poverty. People struggle because of mental health and addiction. People struggle for various reasons. I used to give talks about this and we always say that a lot of the people in the audience, even though you think you’re solidly middle class, you’re one natural disaster away from being on unemployment. And now we’re here. I mean, 22 million people applied for unemployment so maybe now will be the time for some empathy.

With the exception of a few pilot programs, if you have SNAP you can’t order and have them deliver it like everybody else. Even now when you’re telling people to stay in, they’re still not allowing people to use SNAP and EBT for delivery. You’re not allowed to buy a hot meal. So rotisserie chicken that costs four dollars at Trader Joe’s, you can’t use SNAP for that because it’s a hot meal so there’s value-added so you can’t have that. It’s just ridiculous.

Are you seeing anybody in the government taking up this cause right now?

Well, right now we’re advocating — there’s a lot of people advocating — for a 15% increase to SNAP benefits. So they had loosened up some of the restrictions so more people can apply and make it easier to apply, but we’re asking for a 15% increase. During the American Recovery Act in 2008, they added an additional 13.5%. And then after the Recovery Act ended that got pulled back, so we’re asking 15% more and the Republicans are flat out refusing to do it. Flat out refusing. In these last negotiations for the additional PPP in the CARES Act, Democrats wanted to add some things like 15% for SNAP, but… they kind of lost leverage because the PPP ran out and people were just freaking out that they couldn’t get funding.

It’s just a dumb political football game.

I imagine you fund a lot of charitable work through your hospitality businesses. What are those looking like with the crisis?

Well, we’re closed. And in New York, I have no idea when we’re going to open up. The question isn’t also when our governor says it’s okay to open up. The question is whether or not the public are going to feel safe going to a restaurant. When you think about what you have to do to sanitize a restaurant, well heck, every single person walks in you have to go out there and wipe down the door? I’m a co-founder of an organization called the Independent Restaurant Coalition and we have representation and lobbying for what we’re looking for and it’s just not looking good. PPP is not going to work for restaurants. It works for businesses that are currently open, it doesn’t work for businesses that are closed and forced to close right now. So I don’t know.

The James Beard Foundation did a poll across the country and already 20% of restaurants are saying they will not be able to reopen. And that number is going to grow when the reality sinks in. The problem isn’t even getting the doors open. The problem is what kind of business are we looking at when doors are open? Twenty percent? Thirty percent? That’s not sustainable.

Right.

PPP is not helping. If they change the date of origin to when we open restaurants versus when we actually got the loan for our PPP, that would be helpful. But we’re going to need something past this because I think we’re looking at depressed sales for a good six months to a year.

What are some policy changes that you think could help?

Well during the crisis the big problem with the PPP is that it gives you two months of payroll and rent and utilities, provided you bring back 100% of your full-time employees. Which is fine. The big problem right now is my employees are calling me saying, “Well, you want me to come back to work for two months on your payroll. You’re not going to be open for two months and even if we get open, you’re not going to have a full schedule for me.” Let’s just say, so I get my loan now, I bring all my staff back. I’m not open, right? Plus if they open up a month and a half later, I only have funding for my employees for another two weeks. Then they’re back on unemployment. Because if I open up I’m not going to be opened up to the same level of business I was.

Right.

So if you change the day of origin to when the restaurant opens, then I have two months. They’re on unemployment now, they come off unemployment, we open the doors, and we start working. That’s two months where they’re guaranteed salary. I get some rent paid there. And then the only costs I have running the business are some hard costs and food purchases. So now I have some money to get open and on top of that, we’ll be doing what we call a restaurant stabilization package where it’s going to help replace some of our lost income that we’re going to look at going forward to the next six months.

How are you feeding your staff now?

The majority of my staff’s on unemployment right now. We’re in contact with them. Out of the 470 employees that we laid off, we only heard that 24 of them do not have unemployment. I don’t know how accurate that number is, but that’s the response that we have so far. In New York State, unemployment I think maxes out at $525 a week. If you had the $600 that the federal government’s putting on top of that, restaurant workers are making over $1,000 a week. It’s paying their rent, food, and no one’s really going out so I think right now they’re okay. And they’d rather be working, I’d rather be open, but they’re okay.

We do have a fund that was set up. We sold a bunch of gift certificates, stuff like that. So we’re asking our employees if they have any circumstances where they’re really desperate, let us know if they can’t pay their bills or they’re facing eviction or if they have medical bills or something like that, and we’ll help. We’ll help out the best we can, but restaurants rely on daily cash flow. I made a business decision to lay everyone off, because I was on some phone calls early on and knowing that there was going to be an immediate reaction. The first reaction was going to be unemployment was going get plucked up. So my suggestion to all my staff was to try to apply as quickly as possible, don’t wait.

New York State seems to be handling their claims pretty well, but I hear states like Florida, I heard news stories that only 4% of the claims were actually processed. This, again shows just how if you want to take unemployment and push it out to the states, some states are better than others, some states purposely make it difficult to get unemployment so it deters people from applying. These claims are way up, which is costing a ton of money. And this is the system, keep in mind, that the employee pays into and the employer pays into. States are just taking our money and they’re mismanaging it.

What are some problems you see coming with the food supply chain?

Couple things: in some cases supply is outstripping demand. This is why you’re seeing some dairy farmers just throwing milk out. Because think about it — a lot of the businesses that were buying a ton of food like restaurants and college campuses and schools and stadiums and things like that, they’re shut down now. So some food is being overproduced. So farmers are throwing stuff out.

At the same time, when you see processing plants close because of COVID — and there hasn’t been one. There’s one in San Diego getting all the press, but there have been several others and if they shut down the amount of meat that was going through those plants, eventually it’s going to hit the system and we’re going to start seeing meat shortages.

Again, what this does is really expose, and this goes back to policy, the problems with a highly concentrated, vertically-integrated food system — where one company is producing everything. Companies like Tyson and Smithfield where they have such a stranglehold over the production. What it does is it puts all of your eggs in one basket instead of having it spread out throughout the country. If we’re spread out and these are smaller plants, if one shuts down, it’s not going to have that much of an effect. But because everything is concentrated, it’s going to have a major effect. I think we’ll see that in a couple of weeks.

The other problem you have is with cattle ranchers. The majority of the prime cuts of meat, filet mignon, racks, ribs, and loins, and things like that, most of that stuff goes to restaurants. Restaurants are closed, where is that meat going? Seventy percent of all fish consumed in this country is consumed in restaurants. What are the fishermen doing now? You’re not fishing. You’re not making a living, yet they still got to pay payments on their boats and their slips and all that stuff and they have workers who work for them too.

It’s showing the weakness in food production, how it’s distributed, and then obviously our most vulnerable workers who are now all of a sudden deemed necessary workers who up until two months ago were just low pay workers. I think we need to take a look at how workers are compensated up and down the food chain. They need to look at universal health coverage. When 22 million Americans apply for unemployment, their health insurance is tied to their jobs. They’re going to lose their healthcare. A system where you’re tying healthcare to employment… it’s a bad idea.

In terms of the vertically integrated food system, what are policies there that could improve the way it’s currently done?

Create incentives for local foods. It’s about food sovereignty. It’s about taking back the system so it works for people and not for corporations. And you could do that through tax incentives. One of the bigger problems for regional farmers to grow meat is just there are no slaughterhouses. I’m on Eastern Long Island right now on the Northport and I have two friends who have farms. One just sells chicken and the other one has chicken, pork, and lamb. They’ve got to take their animals and ship them to Canada to get processed. It’s so inefficient because there are no slaughterhouses here. So having small, regional slaughterhouses. They don’t have to be huge so that people don’t want to see these big eyesores, but they can be smaller processing plants run by the USDA so the animals can be slaughtered at a local level and food distribution becomes localized.

If you can incentivize the local producers, is there a way to dis-incentivize the mass corporate consolidation that happens?

You can look at whether or not they’re monopolies. And break them up. We’ve done it before.

How are you just dealing personally right now?

It’s rough. Number one, laying off as many people as I’ve laid off. In some cases, people who have worked for me for 18 years. But they understand it. Luckily, no one in my organization has died. A few people were sick but had mild cases. And family-wise, only one person in my family had a mild case and she’s doing okay now. Distance learning. I have a nine-year-old and a 10-year-old so distance learning is challenging at times.

Are you taking up the homeschool reins there?

Some of it, yeah. Yeah. I’m in a way busier than I’ve ever been just kind of working with RIC and doing a lot of press hits and things like that so it’s been… I’m keeping myself busy. I’m cooking a ton of food and baking bread and I got my garden started early this year which is nice. So… we’ll see. Yeah.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. Read more of his cooking commentary in UPROXX’s Cooking Battles and Viral Cooking. For past Top Chef Power Rankings, go here.

After staging a successful comeback in 2019, the Jonas Brothers are already looking forward. Their return record Happiness Begins placed them back at the centerfold of pop after a lengthy hiatus and even garnered the brothers a Grammy nomination and performance at the awards ceremony. Following their triumphs, the Jonas Brothers are now beginning to prepare for a new era of music. The brothers join forces with Latin pop star Karol G for the fiery single “X.”

A buoyant riff opens the single before a rhythmic beat arrives. The track is upbeat and flirty, with the brothers hinting at a fiery fling in the lyrics. “She said, ‘Oh oh oh / Kiss me like your ex is in the room,’” they sing. Karol G offers a change of pace as the tempo breaks to signal her verse’s arrival. Karol echoes the boys’ provocative lyrics, detailing a night of dancing in her native language. “Caliente, te pongo caliente / No te de miedo vivir algo diferente,” Karol swoons.

The single arrives in tandem with the B-side “Five More Minutes,” which the brothers first teased in a clip during their Grammy performance. To celebrate the release of the two tracks, Karol G will join the Jonas Brothers for a premiere live performance of the song on LeBron James’ special Graduate Together: America Honors The Class Of 2020.

Listen to “X” and “Five More Minutes” above.

Graduate Together: America Honors The Class Of 2020 airs 5/16 at 11 p.m. ET. Watch it here.

The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

“I am feeling an intensity. And if I’m not feeling it, then I want it.”

If the title of Mike Hadreas’ fifth album as Perfume Genius is full of anything, it’s intensity. When we spoke on the phone about six weeks into a nationwide quarantine, he’s more than happy to describe some of the emotional labor that went into this new album, even if his spirits are understandably down. Set My Heart On Fire Immediately opens with the uneasiness of another intense realization: “Half of my whole life is gone,” and unfurls from there, meditations on the slipperiness of life and the pressing power of bodies underlined by squiggly production and zen noodling from Blake Mills, who returns for a second time as a collaborator and producer after connecting with Hadreas on 2017’s, No Shape. (“I just really admire him and I really deeply trust his taste and his ability,” Hadreas says of Mills.)

Set My Heart On Fire Immediately is less a follow up to No Shape — which earned Hadreas his first Grammy nomination in the engineering category — as it is an extension of the musical ideas he was beginning to get in touch with. While his first two albums, 2010’s Learning and 2012’s Put Your Back N2 It established Perfume Genius as an indie force and a critical darling, the arc of 2014’s Too Bright, his 2017 release, and now, this year’s record, clearly portray an artist at the top of his game, pushing toward a clarity of purpose and voice, building toward a pinnacle of sound and movement. The introductory single, “Describe,” channels some of the grunge of Hadreas’ hometown of Seattle, the twitchy follow-up “On The Floor” can manage a subtle nod to J Lo while Mike literally crawls in the dirt for his version.

The music of Perfume Genius is rarely triumphant or celebratory in form, but there is a quiet victory in its steely insistence and sometimes somber revelations. The pretext to that opening lyric? He’s still here, living, not a small accomplishment for an artist who battled and survived traumas like childhood bullying, addiction, and the still-looming dangers of life as a queer man in America. Sharper, and more intense, but without losing any gentleness, this new album gestures toward the physicality and body language that has recently begun to occupy Hadreas more and more. Even if you don’t come to this record for joy, there it is, embedded within the resilience after all. But first, the feelings.

“It’s almost like a greediness for fuller feelings,” he continued, still discussing the proclaimed — and felt — immediacy of the album’s title. “The record is maybe a little more patient or more mature about that idea than I am as a person. That’s how writing is a lot, but there’s an immediacy to all of the songs. And that’s how I want my life to be right now. I want to know what’s going on. I want to feel and understand what I’m feeling. Or, be okay with neither of those things happening. I’m sick of reaching towards something or reaching towards a feeling or projecting. I just want it all soon. Or immediately.”

The album title itself doesn’t show up on the tracklist, though — it’s the opening lyric for another song, “Leave,” a foggy, spellbinding track punctuated by strings and vocals so much lower than Hadreas’ normal range that I assume it’s a voice modulation technique. “I didn’t pitch-shift it or anything, I just sang that like that,” he explains. “It’s weird, but I guess I didn’t really think about it until afterwards because that song comes right after the song “Jason,” which is where I sing the highest note I’ve ever sang.” Nearly halfway through the album and almost functioning as an interlude, the lyrics to “Leave” are layered with whispered tongues and howling. For Hadreas, the song represents the space between songwriting’s intimate immediacy, and the process of taking music out into the world, with all the baggage that necessarily accumulates.

“I wrote that song in my room with the lights off, and I got to someplace that felt supernatural,” he remembered. “The air was really sick and slow, but it was dark-sided. Sometimes I can get to that feeling in a warmer way or in a kinder way. This wasn’t unkind, but it was more swampy or something. It’s equally valuable to me. I will take whatever that feeling is that cuts through. So that song is about, what if I could stay here? What if I could sustain this beyond just in the song or where if I didn’t have to package it. What if I could stay in it?”

Lately, packaging himself and his music has also included an element of dance, perhaps a more welcome extension of the process. Though the physicality of Perfume Genius has always been omnipresent — sway-stepping at the microphone, the destructive, campy choreography of his 2012 hit “Queen,” onstage backbends that defy all understanding of human balance — Hadreas stepped more formally into the world of dance by collaborating with choreographer Kate Wallich in 2019 on the dance-based project The Sun Still Burns Here.

But even that project, he insists, was also studded with bouts of improvisation. The balance between planned movement and spontaneity is still an uneasy one for Hadreas. “I maybe would have one little ass move that I would do in certain songs and stuff but there was no real map to it,” he says of his past stage presence. “I haven’t performed on stage after having done the dance thing. I haven’t done it yet. Maybe I’ll try to point my toes. I’m not sure.”

And the collaborative experience with Wallich directly led to bringing more production into the planned tour behind Set My Heart On Fire Immediately, especially since Perfume Genius was booked to open for Tame Impala, who recently headlined Coachella and have risen to become one of the biggest bands in the world. It wasn’t a small opportunity by any means, but one that has now, obviously, been disrupted by measures taken to halt the spread of COVID-19. For an artist like Perfume Genius, tour cancellations aren’t just impacting his schedule, they’re interrupting the entire scope of his vision for his latest, and most ambitious record.

“The whole record, I was imagining performing it live,” he explained. “It’s about being outside and it’s about connection; it’s about the people, and all the ideas that are formulating around performance, and how I was going to get the music to people beyond just releasing it. It’s hard. That’s how musicians sustain themselves really, touring is how you make money. I’m sure there’s a way for me to perform here, inside. Some people are more natural at pointing the camera at themselves in their house and going. And I can still do that. But I just had different ideas for what it was going to be.”

Instead of getting ready to embark on tour, Hadreas has been — like everyone else — getting online. Though his popularity online has been steadily building for a while, lately, his Twitter presence has been the absurdist comedic break that a lot of people have needed to cut the tension. “I find it comforting that 100,000 people will retweet the same absurd nonsense,” he laughed, when asked about the spike in popularity of his tweets. “That’s really comforting to me. I like just how fucking strange people are, and how Twitter is so fucking weird all over the place. I don’t know how I deal with social media. I just do whatever I want. Then, it became easier to post anything because people were following me. I think that’s bad for me, because I really will post anything. Like with Instagram, now I realize that I can use it in a stranger way. And that feels good. I just post a bunch of monkey videos. Once I realized I could post all those monkeys, then I was into it.”

But whether it is a milestone like Grammy nominations and touring with Tame Impala, or his dedication to tweeting about an enormous blouse, there is a sense of responsibility that comes along with all sides of his existence as Perfume Genius, and that is his ability to provide representation as a queer artist. “If I’m proud of anything, I’m proud of that,” he said. “I feel a very strong sense of responsibility about it, and it cuts through everything. I feel very deliberate in trying to be helpful and essentially I feel like my music might help people. It’s so easy to look at other people and know that they’re just perfectly okay exactly as they are and it’s so hard to do that for yourself. If I ever get bratty about that responsibility, it’s very brief because I don’t have a lot. I don’t carry around a lot of those, so I can have that one. And I like that one. And I feel like I can do some good.”

Set My Heart On FIre Immediately is out today via Matador Records. Get it here.

There’s bad movies, there’s good bad movies, and there’s Battlefield Earth.

The 2000 film/Scientology propaganda, directed by Roger Christian and starring John Travolta, Barry Pepper, and Forest Whitaker, exists on a planet (Xenu) of its own. It was met with savage reviews when it was released, and unlike other famous “flops” like Ishtar, there has not been a critical reevaluation (“Dangerous Business” is a bop). It’s terrible, albeit fascinatingly so, and a common answer for the worst movie of all-time.

But the guy who wrote it thinks there’s a new Battlefield Earth.

“I watched about 10 or 15 minutes of Cats, and unfortunately, it might beat out Battlefield Earth,” J. David Shapiro told the New York Post. “To regular people, Cats was f*cking disturbing.” Judi Dench (and basically everyone else in the cast) and Seth Rogen agree.

Shapiro sounds disappointed that Cats might be considered even worse than Battlefield, which he apologized for writing in 2010. “Let me start by apologizing to anyone who went to see Battlefield Earth,” he wrote. “It wasn’t as I intended — promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those. He added, “Now, looking back at the movie with fresh eyes, I can’t help but be strangely proud of it. Because out of all the sucky movies, mine is the suckiest.” If only Battlefield Earth had digital fur technology.

(Via New York Post)

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The animated Scooby-Doo reboot Scoob! is out now, and it has a star-studded cast led by Will Forte, Zac Efron, Amanda Seyfried, and Gina Rodriguez. Similarly, Scoob! The Album was also released today, and it too features some big names. That includes Rico Nasty, who contributes “My Little Alien” to the record. The catchy tune appeals to Rico’s pop sensibilities, and features a catchy hook, on which Rico sings, “You’re my little alien / You came down from out of the sky / People don’t know what you are / And I couldn’t explain it if I tried.”

Beyond Rico, the album also features contributions from Charli Puth, Lennon Stella, Thomas Rhett, Kane Brown, Ava Max, Jack Harlow, Sage The Gemini, Bygtwo3, Galantis, Faouzia, Pink Sweats, Rare Americans, R3hab, Arizona, Plested, Token, and Best Coast.

Meanwhile, Rico recently updated Uproxx about her upcoming album, Nightmare Vacation, saying in a recent interview, “Coronavirus, it might have inspired me to actually do what I always wanted to do with the album, which was make it very virtual. I’m not going to say too much about that, but just I will leave you with that. I always wanted my album to be similar to a simulation, VR. If you get my drift, like as far as the visuals go and sh*t like that. [Right now] you can’t touch me, you can’t come to the show. So that’s what we’re developing right now is giving them that opportunity to really damn near be in the same room as me. No holograms, weird sh*t like that. But some high tech sh*t.”

Listen to “My Little Alien” above.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Last week, the Pitchfork Music Festival was officially canceled, an inevitable development in the midst of a rapidly deteriorating summer tour schedule. Right now, it seems trivial to mourn such relatively minor things. And yet, I must admit I’m sad to miss The Fiery Furnaces.

The Chicago-based brother-sister duo — who put out their debut album, Gallowbird’s Bark, in 2003 and went on hiatus in 2011 — announced in February that Pitchfork Fest would be their grand return to the indie-rock world. Other shows, while not announced, were assumed (at least by me) to be in the works. Perhaps those shows will still happen at that unforeseen date when gathering with a few hundred strangers inside a dark, tightly packed nightclub no longer is fodder for nightmares. But for now, their comeback seems like it has, at best, been put on hold, if not derailed completely. And that bums me out, because 2020 could really use a band this brilliantly bizarre and bizarrely brilliant.

I realize I’m probably throwing newbies in the deep end here, but if you don’t know this band, I highly recommend heading to blogs like NYC Taper and checking out their live recordings. To call The Fiery Furnaces an adventurous concert act doesn’t nearly do them the justice they deserve. In the late aughts, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger radically rearranged their twisty-turny, overstuffed songs seemingly every other week with supercharged synth splashes, wonky guitar solos, and hyperactive drum fills. There’s no guarantee that bootleg recordings from the same album cycle will sound alike, even if they’re only separated by a matter of weeks.

If you dig a little deeper, you’ll find recordings from the mid-aughts, when they were touring behind their most famous album, the near-impenetrable “Grimm’s Fairy Tales meets Selling England By The Pound” pop-prog masterwork Blueberry Boat. At that time, they would stuff nearly 40 songs into a single 50-minute set, somehow melding the swiftness of the Minutemen’s Double Nickels On The Dime with the grandiosity of The Beatles’ Abbey Road.

I know that’s a lot of rock-geek influences piled on top of each other, but it’s otherwise difficult to explain this band. The songs were always catchy and, in their own way, pop. The Fridebergers’ impeccable taste in delectable vintage instrumental tones makes their music particularly luscious for vinyl hounds. (Here’s another rock-geek reference: They’re like The Carpenters if they attempted Tales From Topographic Oceans.) But their music and especially their lyrics were also incredibly, even stupidly, convoluted, and often tied to concepts that are easier to admire for their extreme perversity than as, you know, songs. At the height of their indie fame in 2005, for instance, they released a rock opera called Rehearsing My Choir voiced in large part by the Friedbergers’ elderly grandmother. It’s about listenable as that sounds. But, again, what an interesting idea!

Back in the aughts, The Fiery Furnaces seemed a little ahead of their time, though in retrospect, they surprisingly make a lot of more sense in the context of what was happening in indie rock. Their debut Gallowsbird’s Bark was released the same year as The White Stripes’ Elephant, and Matt and Eleanor’s superficial resemblance to Jack and Meg — they were two quirky brunettes from the midwest who were actual brother and sister, as opposed to Jack and Meg’s playacted version — got them pegged as garage-rock B-listers.

But Gallowsbird’s Bark — which was made in just three days, supposedly during Eleanor’s first visit to a recording studio — was actually much stranger and idiosyncratic than that classification suggests, taking the primitivism of The White Stripes in a less literal and more novel direction. Whereas The White Stripes would vamp on Son House for six minutes, The Fiery Furnaces would start with a jump blues riff, tie it to a nursery-rhyme narrative, and then segue to a twisted pastoral folk melody that might devolve into pure noise, with little logical rationale for the progression beyond primal familial intuition.

In interviews, the Friedbergers played off each other like a brother-sister comedy duo, with Matthew — a reformed punk rocker who once said that trying to get attention for your music was “kind of gross” — playing the Jack White-like Svengali and Eleanor deflating his pomposity with a well-placed quip or withering stare. Together, they described their music as an amalgam of “Bo Diddley, bad-sounding psychedelia, sentimental, weeping-in-your-beer ballads of the ’70s like Gilbert O’Sullivan’s ‘Alone Again Naturally,’ and the bad imitations of dub reggae on Sandinista by The Clash.” (They, like me, resorted to rock-geek-speak to describe The Fiery Furnaces.)

“We’d like to play for little kids and in old folks’ homes,” Matthew says in a 2003 Guardian interview, “and play in nasty bars as well. The music we want to play is more catholic — it’s a big enough mess that whether it’s the old folk or the kids, they could find something amusing. Hopefully, it is really silly, shiny music. I want it to have a broken toy sound. And also a piano singalong thing. I always like the idea of families entertaining themselves by singing, like every member of a family has a special song they sing when they get drunk enough, a Cole Porter song or whatever. That’s fun pop music to me.”

“Having a song to sing at family events when you get drunk,” Eleanor repeats, with a sarcasm that’s impossible not to discern, even on the page. “Yeah. My song is “Tomorrow.” From Annie.”

Matthew fully stepped forward as the band’s dominant creative force on their next album, Blueberry Boat. If Gallowsbird’s Bark is their Safe As Milk — a relatively conventional rock record — then Blueberry Boat is their Trout Mask Replica, a 76-minute left-field tour-de-force that demands that you either love or hate it. Heard now, it sounds like a key album in aughts-era indie’s transition from the garage-rock revivalism of the decade’s first half, and the proggy, childhood-obsessed art rock of the second half. Though Blueberry Boat also should be put in its own category.

The highest compliment I can give Blueberry Boat is that it seems even more ahead of its time 16 years after it came out. Revisiting it this week made a lot of conversations about contemporary indie rock seem quaint. You think Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters might be a little too abrasive or theatrical? Give a listen to “Chief Inspector Blancheflower.” You’re amazed at the eclecticism of The 1975’s recent singles? This runs through half-a-dozen different genres in one song. You found that Lana Del Rey’s last album had a lot of long, epic tracks? It’s not as big or dense as this.

That’s not a criticism of those recent indie hits. It just underscores how uniquely confrontational The Fiery Furnaces were. This was a band that deliberately drew a line in the sand between those who would get it and those who wouldn’t, and they made sure that the people in the former group was much smaller. It helped that at the time a band could actually be rewarded for such behavior with glowing press. Pitchfork gave Blueberry Boat a 9.6 in the summer of 2004, just 0.1 lower than the famous review of Funeral that helped to break Arcade Fire a few months later. “The exuberant overload of Blueberry Boat will thrill and transport you with the ineluctable force of a great children’s story, one whose execution matches its imagination,” the review promised.

Whenever I put on Blueberry Boat‘s wondrously batshit 10-minute opener, “Quay Cur,” I like to imagine the thousands of Pitchfork readers who gave this album a chance based on that review, and then guess at which point they angrily bailed. This never fails to make me chuckle. For more than two minutes, you hear a sluggish drum machine and jarring synth bleeps accented with occasional clanking piano chords. Then Eleanor’s arch, carefully enunciated vocal finally enters the picture. But just when you think you understand what this song is, it suddenly transitions to a sinister art-rock stomp. Then it turns into greasy off-kilter blues, and then psychedelic folk, and then back to sinister art-rock and then back to a wigged-out folkie meander.

I haven’t even mentioned the lyrics yet. The lyrics make even less sense than the music. “A looby, a lordant, a lagerhead, lozel / a lungio lathback made me a proposal” has to be my favorite line from “Quay Cur,” even though it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. (This one is a close second: “Dawding on the drizzy deck of my majesty’s sloop / If only the helmsman would turn from his whip staff / With my azimuth compass I’d go by the hectograph / Up to the whaling fleet in Gilbert sound.”)

What does any of this mean? I have no idea. Trying to “understand” The Fiery Furnaces will get you nowhere. Their songs are not meant to be deciphered. This music is meant to overwhelm the senses and replicate the childlike feeling of being simultaneously dazzled, confused, and terrified by the outside world, taking you back to a time when even a pop song could seem unfamiliar and unknowable. And it’s refreshing! Put on Blueberry Boat and any ingrained cynicism about having heard it all before rapidly burns away. Being overwhelmed and even confounded is sort of the point.

It seems strange to yearn for this sort of music when everyday life is already overwhelming and confounding. But listening to The Fiery Furnaces while cooped up inside is a reminder that the world really is a vast, mysterious place that contains endless shocks and surprises. Adventure awaits us all if we’re open to it. One day, hopefully, we’ll get to experience it again.

Charli XCX has been transparent with the making of her new quarantine album, How I’m Feeling Now, keeping her fans deeply involved on the journey. The album is out now, and just before its release, Charli shared a quick video recapping the final week of making the record.

The 90-second video begins with Charli addressing the camera, “I just finished an all-nighter session. […] It’s eight days until the album comes out, and I’m really pushing myself to the limit. I think it will be worth it.” From there, it’s a mix of clips of her working on the record and otherwise living her life. The video ends with a look at the impromptu in-bed photoshoot that yielded the final album art.

Also ahead of the album, Charli shared a lengthy post on Instagram in which she reflected on the process of making the album and gave her thanks to those who helped bring it to life, writing:

“I can’t believe #howimfeelingnow is out this Friday!! this whole process has been so incredible & i’m so happy you’ve all been such a crucial part of the creative process! co writing verse 2 of ‘anthems’ on insta live, making the ‘forever’ video together from all your amazing clips, your green screen versions of ‘claws’, the remixes & edits you made using the stems I dropped (& playing them on my Apple Music show!), deciding which photos to use as a basis for the artworks, collecting your own amazing artworks you’ve been making, helping me with production decisions & so much more… i couldn’t have made this album without you! howimfeelingnowinbox@gmail.com has been bombarded with wild beats, artwork & ideas & it’s been so inspiring going through it all.”

In that post, she also revealed she plans to make a book that will “document the art all of us have been making alongside this project,” and that all profits from it will benefit LA Alliance For Human Rights.

Watch the video above.

How I’m Feeling Now is out now via Asylum. Get it here.

Charli XCX is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

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If you ask Nicholas Hoult, he’ll blame the wigs. They’re one of the reasons why he’s gotten into the habit of playing scene-stealing baroque dandies in wildly funny period dramas. They’ve given him a new avenue to explore in his decades-long career and introduced him to eccentric, extremely GIF-able villains you can’t help but laugh at. They’re what allowed him to shove Emma Stone in a ditch in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Oscar-nominated The Favourite, and they’ve helped him get into character again for Hulu’s upcoming 18th-century punk Russian soap opera, The Great.

Of course, Tony McNamara is the bigger reason why Hoult seems to gravitate towards this time period and these completely-obtuse, too-powerful historical figures. He penned The Favourite before helming Hulu’s stylishly modern retelling of Catherine The Great’s early years. Elle Fanning may play the show’s leading heroine — a young woman thrust into the freakish, almost campy court of Peter III — but it’s Hoult who seems to be having the most fun with McNamara’s quick-witted, satirical script (of course, he’s also the one who gets to toss a Pomeranian off a balcony so…). We chatted with Hoult about his career evolution, not getting bored, and why 18th-century life feels oddly relevant right now.

You’re unnaturally talented when it comes to playing these aristocratic, asshole types. Does putting on a wig just do that to you?

Yeah, there’s just something in my DNA, where I put on a wig and I just turn into these bizarre humans. I do weirdly find it quite fun, playing these offbeat, very disconnected people, who have no sense of the world around them. That, with Tony’s writing, I think it’s just so singular and unique and fun. They’re characters that, you can feel like you can do anything, at any moment with them. That’s something that’s really liberating and freeing. They’re wild and untamable, but you’ve also got a construct of a great script that you can stick to.

Playing these really terrible characters, does it ever cause you to self-reflect?

I don’t know. In many ways, you have to always understand the voice, or where this character’s coming from, I suppose. Peter, he’s been put into this position where he never quite knows who he can trust. Also, he’s been put in this position. He doesn’t really want it. He just wants to have fun. Now, he’s stuck with all these things that he has to do that he doesn’t enjoy. It is interesting playing this character, because you don’t want him to be completely unlikeable and so far removed from being an understandable person, that there’s no redemption for him. He’s following in the footsteps of his father. His mother obviously tortured him as a child and scarred him. He does want to better himself at times. He’s trying to improve, but he just lacks certain social skills, and understanding to be able to work on that. It’s a little bit of a balancing act, I suppose, trying to create a character that’s very much in that gray area of, not fully good but not fully bad and so horrible that you just detest him.

I think that comes down to the comedy in the script because this show is so darkly funny. How do you do justice to that humor?

It’s always that thing of not trying to play jokes. I think I got a good education working with Tony’s writing and doing The Favourite — how Yorgos approached that process. It’s very much letting the words do the work for you, which is actually a brilliant thing as an actor, because it takes all pressure off you performing, or trying to make things funny. There’s nothing worse than reading a script that’s clearly meant to be funny, but isn’t, and I have to try and make it funny. Whereas this, you can really just let the words do the business for you, in a way.

There are plenty of absurd moments in the show, normally involving your character. Were any of those challenging to film?

The most difficult thing I found, honestly, was trying to not giggle on set when someone else had a funny line, or I had a funny line. There’s a weird thing where, it can completely take you out of the moment, when it actually becomes funny to you while you’re doing it. My stern voice has to come out and I have to say, “Come on. People want to get home to their families. You don’t want them to go home and complain about how this actor sucks, and he can’t say his lines without giggling.” I have to give myself a talking to.

You could try going full method.

Yeah, but then I’d be acting like I was the emperor of Russia for six months, which I don’t think, for normal life, is too habitable.

It sounds fun though.

It could be really fun, but I think I’d come out the other end a little bit shocked at what happened in life, and how I’d ended up in this position.

There’s such variety in the projects you’ve chosen, throughout your career. How do you approach choosing what you’re going to work on next?

It’s definitely a thought process. I think I’d just get bored as an actor, and as a person, if I was rehashing the same type of character, or genre of show, film, whatever. I always want to be evolving and trying something new. That is a very much conscious decision, whenever I get sent a script. I enjoy trying to make bold characters, I guess. Obviously, it depends on which character you’re playing and what world they’re in, but it is fun when you get to play these slightly more obscene, larger than life characters, that you can fully commit to. That then is just a fun environment to be in, as long as if you’ve got good people around you that you trust. It’s wild. It’s a let loose kind of relief.

This is a show about incompetent leaders and how disconnected they are. It’s set in the 18th century, but it feels oddly relevant.

Yeah, definitely. It’s politics. Because of the year the show’s set, it’s very much on the microscopic level. Peter’s always having his ear bent, whether it be by the church, the aristocrats, Catherine, or all these people trying to get their way, keep their power and manage their interests. I think that’s very much what’s going on in the world. I’m a fan of Veep, and those sorts of shows, that do a similar thing, in a similar tone in some ways, where they take a look at what’s happening. Sometimes, the ridiculous elements of those things are actually, probably closer the truth than we’d like to admit.

I like that you referenced Veep because I feel like maybe this is just a historically based, period Veep with more wigs.

There you go.

Hulu’s ‘The Great’ premieres on May 15.